Singer, songwriter and musician Laura Nyro passed away this month in 1997 (April 8)
I was going to share this one the anniversary of her passing but couldn’t find where I got it from and am now really annoyed so if its yours please get in touch and leave a message and I will credit you!
Laura Nyro was a creative genius, and is one of the most underrated artists in modern music.
Her compositions are a revelation, spanning genres, and often changing time signatures mid-song with breathtaking freedom of expression.
While in high school, she sang with a group of friends in subway stations and on street corners. She said, "I would go out singing, as a teenager, to a party or out on the street, because there were harmony groups there, and that was one of the joys of my youth."
The second time she ever played in front of a live audience was the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival with the likes of The Who and Hendrix. It was also where a young Janis Joplin made her big debut.
Laura Nyro was just 19 years old, and performed an 18-minute-long set after The Byrds and before the Jefferson Airplane.
She is not wildly famous in the general population, but her influence on her peers has been profound and wide-reaching.
Artists who have claimed to be influenced or inspired by Laura Nyro include Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Tori Amos, Patti Smith, Kate Bush, Bette Midler, Rickie Lee Jones, Janis Ian, Elton John, Jackson Browne, Alice Cooper, Elvis Costello, Cyndi Lauper, Todd Rundgren, Steely Dan, Sarah Cracknell, Melissa Manchester, and Suzanne Vega.
Bob Dylan was also a fan, and she opened for him on occasions.
Todd Rundgren stated that once he heard her, he "stopped writing songs like The Who and started writing songs like Laura”.
Rundgren's debut solo album “Runt” (1970) includes the strongly Nyro-influenced "Baby Let's Swing" which was written about her and mentions her by name.
Rundgren and Nyro remained friends for much of her professional career and he subsequently assisted her with the recording of her album “Mother's Spiritual”.
Elton John and Elvis Costello discussed Nyro's influence on both of them during the premiere episode of Costello's interview show Spectacle. When asked by the host if he could name three great performer/songwriters who have largely been ignored, Elton John cited Nyro as one of his choices.
He said “She was the first person, songwriting-wise, where there were no rules.
There were tempo changes. There wasn’t a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight. She didn’t write in that kinda way.
She influenced more songwriters that came out—and successful songwriters—than probably anyone who came before her.”
“I idolized her," he concluded. "This is music so far ahead of its time that still sounds so unbelievable. The soul, the passion, just the out and out audacity of the way her rhythmic and melody changes come is like nothing I’d ever heard before.”
Janis Ian, who attended the High School of Music and Art in New York at the same time as Nyro, discussed her friendship with Nyro during the late 1960s in her autobiography, Society's Child. Ian described her as looking like a "Morticia Addams" caricature with her long, dark hair, and called her a "brilliant songwriter" but "oddly inarticulate" in terms of musical terminology.
In her memoir, “Last Chance Texaco”, Rickie Lee Jones describes discovering Nyro's music in the summer of 1970, saying “Somehow, the moment I fell in love with Laura I loved myself just a little more.
I believe an invisible cord came out of me and attached itself to Laura Nyro that summer.
Or vice versa.”
Nyro turned down lucrative film-composing offers, although she contributed a rare protest song to the Academy Award-winning documentary “Broken Rainbow”, about the unjust relocation of the Navajo people.
The Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live, and the Late Show with David Letterman pursued Nyro for TV appearances, but she turned them down, citing her discomfort with appearing on television.
She performed increasingly in the 1980s and 1990s with female musicians, including her friend Nydia "Liberty" Mata, a drummer, and several others from the women's music subculture, such as members of the band Isis, appearing at such venues as the 1989 Michigan Womyn's Music Festival and the 1989 Newport Folk Festival.
In the early 1980s, Nyro began living with painter Maria Desiderio (1954–1999), a relationship that lasted 17 years, the rest of Nyro's life.
Nyro was a feminist and openly discussed it on a number of occasions, once saying, "I may bring a certain feminist perspective to my songwriting, because that's how I see life."
She commented: "I was always interested in the social consciousness of certain songs.
My mother and grandfather were progressive thinkers, so I felt at home in the peace movement and the women's movement, and that has influenced my music."
By the late 1980s, Nyro had become an animal rights activist and vegetarian, and began to offer literature on the subject at her concerts.
She passed away of ovarian cancer in Danbury, Connecticut, on April 8, 1997, at 49, the same age at which her mother died of the same disease.
On April 14, 2012, Laura Nyro was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The induction speech was delivered by Bette Midler and the song "Stoney End" was performed by singer Sara Bareilles at the induction ceremony.
Nyro had previously been posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010.
There are many songs I could have chosen, but here’s “I Met Him on a Sunday”, which echoes the formative days of her youth, singing harmonies in subways:
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